Archives for July 2012

Together is the second in a trilogy of books by Richard Sennett, university professor of humanities at New York University and professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. It is part of what he describes as his ‘homo faber project’ – that is, man as his own maker. It was in writing his first volume in the trilogy, The Craftsman, that Sennett says he found himself thinking about ‘cooperation as a craft’. He wanted to look at how it ‘oils the machinery of getting things done’ and how ‘sharing with others can make up for what we individually lack’.

Sennett uses the example of the workshop through the ages. This is partly literal – to describe the cooperative ends to which craft has been put. But it is also used metaphorically, to illustrate the making and remaking of relationships and how we need sometimes to repair these relationships. The rituals and gestures that people have evolved over the centuries need to be worked at, and consciously shaped, if we are to reacquire the skills that enabled previous generations to get on with each other. So says Sennett.

Where other commentators reduce everything to demeaning comparative psychology and cost-benefit models, Sennett sets the scene with a rich historical account of how the creation of secular rituals has succeeded in ‘turning people outward in shared, symbolic acts’.

Sennett describes the Reformation’s challenge to the undermining of the cooperative rituals of the mass and the ‘spectacular theatre’ performed by the priest. (Sadly, he goes on to make a rather unhelpful analogy with ‘groomed and spin-doctored’ politicians playing to the supposedly duped and passive masses today.) There is the advent of printing that would ‘unsettle the authority’ of the medieval church and workshop alike. There is also the shift from chivalry to civility and the codes of courtesy that would impose an ethic of restraint on courtly behaviour and beyond. And there is the emergence of the ‘professional civility’ of business and of diplomacy in the imperial age. The fleeting ‘encounters with strangers in cafes and coffee houses’ of late eighteenth-century London and Paris is contrasted with a nineteenth century when ‘strangers would not speak to one another freely… unless expressly invited to do so’. Finally, there is the modern world where, for all the anxieties about how we relate to each other, we have an ‘insistent demand for intimacy’.

The key moment, though, as far as Sennett’s argument is concerned, is where he begins – in a late nineteenth-century Europe and America of rapidly industrialising cities. It is at this point, he observes, that two distinct traditions emerge: the social left and the political left, in response to the upheavals of the time. Advocates of the former – community organisers – called for ‘sociality’ and ‘mutual awareness’, particularly among emerging emigrant communities. The latter, trades unionists and the political representatives of labour, concerned themselves with workers’ solidarity. Like their modern-day counterparts in the community-building industry, the former pursued ‘cooperation with others as an end in itself’ and would ‘focus on immediate experience’. They realised, explains Sennett all too sympathetically, that the ‘big picture is likely to root even more deeply someone’s sense that it is hopeless to get involved’. It is good to ‘rouse people from passivity’, but not too much; to enable and assist, but never to ‘direct’ them. He thus finds history’s backing for his own leftish version of the UK government’s policies, an amalgam of the Big Society and ‘nudge’. In reading history backwards, he makes a case not only against the ‘political’ left but against politics itself.

Instead of drawing on his considerable insights into the way people have developed the secular rituals of cooperative behaviour in the past, to shed some light on what we lack today, Sennett opts for a familiar leftish prejudice. It is, we are told, inequality that is driving a wedge between us. Despite the historical gains and our apparently biologically given urge to cooperate, the ‘capitalist beast has crushed these promises’ and turned us against each other. The ways of the existing social order actively ‘repress and distort our capacity to live together’. But why now, you might ask? Surely even in our own austere times we’re much better off than earlier generations, never mind as compared with the era when this social system was created more than two hundred years ago? Sennett, though, is not concerned with the material impact of ‘capitalism in the raw’ so much as the ever-widening ‘spread between richer and poorer sections within a society’. This relative inequality encourages ‘invidious comparisons’, he says, that begin in childhood and that are felt particularly acutely in the UK and the US where the social bonds of cooperation are at their weakest.

This is not a new or especially convincing argument, but Sennett at least develops it in an interesting direction. During a study conducted in 1970s Boston, he was surprised to find that assembly-line workers would cover for underperforming, burdensome alcoholic colleagues. The trust between them, he recalls, established itself on the ‘shoals of weakness and self-damage’, a therapeutic theme he returns to a number of times. More likely, it was a collective strength derived from an appreciation of their shared interests that enabled workers to care for their weaker colleagues. Still, by contrast, Sennett’s interviews with back-office workers in today’s post-crash Wall Street revealed what he describes as an ‘absence of a countervailing culture of civility’. In place of the camaraderie of old he found a ‘thin, superficial’ connection between workers, however ‘embittered’ they may have felt about the threat to their jobs.

This shift in the experience of working relationships is a consequence of how ‘people’s experience of one another and knowledge of their institutions has shortened’, says Sennett. But by blaming ‘finance capitalism’ for this tendency towards incivility, he both ignores more important long-running and contemporary trends, and tends himself to drift from his broad historical account toward a narrow, psychosocial analysis.

For all his talk of the evils of capitalism and the psychic damage it inflicts, he doesn’t seem to want to do much about capitalism itself. While Sennett is appalled by the levels and persistence of unemployment in the UK, he sees the dole queue as an ever-lengthening fact of life to be accommodated to rather than challenged. The most important job of all, he declares, is that of the job counsellor. Skilled in ‘indirect cooperation’, he is best placed to manage the emotional impact of worklessness. Sennett even offers his own advice to job seekers, advising them not to ‘hammer home’ their desperate need for a job – reverting once more to the workshop analogy – but instead learn the rituals of the job interview.

He thinks this sort of thing necessary because increasingly people are unable to ‘manage demanding, complex forms of social engagement’. ‘Faced with a weak, lightweight and unreliable social order’, he argues, ‘people retreat into themselves’. They become narcissistic and self-absorbed. But rather than try to explain the emergence of this withdrawn character type by completing his historical account – or with reference to his rightly acclaimed book, The Fall of Public Man’ – he succumbs to it himself. He returns a number of times to his own childhood growing up in a public-housing project in a poor neighbourhood of the same city. Sennett describes the ‘littered streets and broken-windowed tenements’ of his own time as ‘disorders’ and those who got out as ‘survivors’ of a trauma. But this projection of a therapeutic imagination onto the messy business of urban change tells us more about Sennett today than Chicago then.

He conforms to the predominant view that we have too much individualism – but Sennett’s individualism is the fantasy, grasping kind – not the real, anxious kind. The officious over-regulation of everyday life, and the rise of vetting regimes to protect the ‘vulnerable’, is an ongoing feature of contemporary society and testament to this more troubling reality. This political culture of fear and restraint – and the anti-individualism of the new communitarians of both left and right – remains the most formidable obstacle to people cooperating with each other. Even the modest ambitions of getting involved in your neighbourhood – never mind the world beyond your doorstep – can seem like a pipe dream today. The ‘economic wound’ described by Sennett means that he ‘doubts that such communities can sustain themselves economically’.

Having said that, only a fool would pretend that all is well. Last summers English riots, not to mention wider concern about anti-social behaviour, suggest that there is a serious problem that we need to get to grips with. But Sennett’s interpersonal lessons in ‘everyday diplomacy’ are not going to help. That ‘ordinary people are driven back on themselves’ is made explicable not by the evils of contemporary capitalism, but by the defeat of the political left and the emergence of an ideas-lite and enfeebling political culture. The problem is not that people have become more selfish or unequal, but that the kinds of ideas and values that are conducive to civility – and to the very notion of ‘man as his own maker’ – are being actively undermined by a profound social pessimism found in the arguments employed by Sennett himself.

While there is much of value in his retelling of the history of civility – and we might all benefit from a more thorough grounding in civility’s historical making – he does not begin to tackle what is really getting in the way of building a better and more civil public life today.

Ok, I’ll admit when I first read a headline not so long ago that Riots may be controlled with chemicals, I got the wrong end of the stick. Or should I say baton? I thought that given their humiliation on the streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool last summer, the police had decided in future to spray rioters into a drug-induced stupor. In fact the article referred to a riots-fuelled frenzy of research and spending as they go on a shopping spree for new weaponry with which to project CS gas, pepper spray and something called ‘skunk oil’ at the nation’s unruly youth.

What they and their colleagues in the political class have singularly failed to do, however, is to project their authority. Hence the stockpiling of ammunition in a vain attempt to shore it up. Ken Clarke admitted in the wake of the riots that ‘the system was briefly caught unawares’. As were we all. The riots were, he said, ‘part of an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes’. Clarke argued that reforming the criminal justice system would not be enough. The ‘social deficit’ needed to be addressed by changes in ‘education, welfare and family policy too’ – by implication the latter bringing into question not only the authority of state institutions but of teachers, communities and families. While I don’t agree with his solutions the justice secretary at least understands the gravity of the problem. Which is why, a year on, we need to revisit the riots.

And we can start by questioning the stale old assumptions used to explain them away at the time. Doing some projecting of their own were the left-liberal commentariat supported by no end of hastily hashed together reports finding – surprise, surprise – what they were hoping to find all along. Eagerly taking the reins of their favourite hobby horse, the first to echo the excuses of the rioters were the authors of a Guardian-LSE study.

In their initial conclusions they acknowledged that many looters admitted to being opportunists. But hostility toward the police and ‘a range of political grievances’ vaguely to do with economic disadvantage were also to blame, they concluded. As did the other reports. But what’s new? Why did the riots happen when they did, why did they spread so quickly only to die down again? Why the need to write so many reports to discern the ‘political grievances’ of what looked so randomly destructive to the rest of us?

No more insightful was Brian Paddick, former deputy assistant in the Metropolitan Police and recurrently hopeless London Mayoral candidate, who claimed that the failure to hold an inquest into the death of Mark Duggan – whose shooting is said to have ‘triggered’ the riots – will somehow lead to ‘another riot’. Similarly one of the police officers interviewed as part of the Guardian-LSE study was in little doubt that all it will take is ‘bad economic times, hot weather, some sort of an event that sets it off’. What … like the Olympics?!

I am no fan of the revolting rioters who trashed their communities only to be indulged as poor victims by ventriloquist apologists. But surely even their actions are not so easily determined by the official response to an incident that, in the end, had as much to do with the riots as the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had to do with the outbreak of the First World War. Never mind the bloody weather!

Everybody concerned needs to grow a backbone. From the police and the politicians, to the young people, families and communities that they, not to mention the academics and commentators more interested in confirming their own prejudices, are so busy patronising. In fact we should all be getting to grips with what were extraordinary, disturbing and quite unprecedented events but may well come back to haunt us if we don’t.

You’d think last summer’s riots would harden the attitude of the political elite on youthful criminality. For all the tough and therapeutic talk, far from it.

Ian Birrell, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, has defended the notion that we should hug a hoodie. This softly-softly approach is far preferable to the legislative diarrhoea of a New Labour administration that was ‘so contemptuous of civil liberties’, he says. Similarly we should welcome the approach of the rather likeable if gaff-prone Kenneth Clarke after the ‘prison works’ – er, no it doesn’t – line pursued by former home secretary and Tory leader Michael Howard. Regardless of how hard line successive governments have claimed to be the prison population, says Birrell, has nearly doubled over the past 20 years, and re-offending rates are as high as ever.

But is the opening of the prison gates much of an alternative? It seems obvious that to do so can’t help but ‘work’ in as far as it reduces prison numbers. But is it really the case that ‘community punishments, restorative justice and rehabilitation’ are any more just than incarceration as Birrell claims? It seems to me that this question will remain unanswered for as long as the in/out debate is more concerned with reducing public spending than the rights and wrongs of the criminal justice system.

Either way, his concern that Cameron is now reverting to Old Tory type is misplaced. According to The Guardian the prime minister proposes ‘giving courts the power to confiscate offenders’ credit cards, passports and driving licences … [and] to electronically tag offenders and prevent them from leaving home for most of the day’. But far from being a throwback to less cuddly times this only confirms the illiberalism of the supposedly liberal non-custodial alternative to locking criminals up.

The reality is that the government and its supposedly ‘progressive’ opponents are turning society into an open prison. This not only blurs the line between the inside and the outside, but implies that none of us are properly free. It would be a far more just and liberal approach to insist that criminals ‘do their time’.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.